Annotation from the Connection Collection

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Title:

A longitudinal assessment of teacher perceptions of parent involvement in children's education and school performance

Author:

Izzo, C. V., Weissberg, R. P., Kasprow, W. J., & Fendrich, M.

Year:

1999

Resource Type:

Journal Article

PublicationInformation:

American Journal of Community Psychology, 27(6)

pp.
817-839

Connection:

School-Family

Education Level:

Elementary

Literature type:

Research and Evaluation

Annotation:This study examines the ways parent involvement in children's education changes over time and how parent involvement relates to children's social and academic functioning at school. An important finding was that parents' participation in educational activities at home significantly predicted the widest range of performance variables, and predicted academic achievement more strongly than any other parent involvement variable. In addition, the quality of parent-teacher interactions uniquely predicted improvement in both children's behavior and academic achievement. In this experimental longitudinal study over three years, 1,205 urban elementary school children in a small, ethnically diverse New England city were studied. Relationships among four measures of parent involvement and five measures of students' school performance were explored. Teachers completed two questionnaires, the Teacher-Child Rating Scale (Hightower et al., 1986) and the Teacher-Parent Survey (Reynolds et al., 1992), for randomly selected children from their kindergarten to third grade classes. Questionnaires were completed on this same group of students the second and third years. This research supports the notion that schools can improve childrenÕs performance by increasing parents' ability to support learning at home. While parent involvement variables did not always predict improvements in school performance, further research is needed to explore the parent and teacher perspectives about what constitutes appropriate parent-teacher collaboration and what role each should play in that process. Although results suggested that activities requiring parents to come to the school are more difficult to maintain than other kinds of activities, schools need to engage in more proactive outreach as children get older.